


The Adventure of the Shanghaied Surgeon

by rabidsamfan



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (US TV 1954)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:36:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when Sherlock Holmes isn't getting Watson into danger, danger still seems to find a way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Shanghaied Surgeon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



> Thank you to donutsweeper for the beta.

_When I say that my friend, Sherlock Holmes is one of the foremost amateur chemists in the nation, I should note that the noun in that particular construction is “amateur.” “Chemist” is a mere adjective. Mind you, Holmes is an amateur_ par excellence _. His accomplishments in criminology and detection are exemplary; his knowledge of anatomy rivals mine, despite my training; and his botanical expertise, while exclusive to poisonous species, has led to several well-received monographs. He files away minutiae on a hundred topics into his brain-attic, and can speak at length on all of them. Were he content with simply memorizing facts he would be the perfect companion. But he dabbles with practical skills, as well, where the deficiencies of his scattered attention are far more apparent. He might have mastered lock-picking, but the violin continues to elude him._

_And it is his fascination with chemistry, where he must combine broad knowledge with endless experimentation, which is the bane of my existence. He never lets inadequate equipment, or for that matter common sense, deter him in his researches. The deal table in the corner has been set afire so often that a new conflagration is scarcely a matter for comment. Our teakettles (we are on our third!) are used in place of alembics, when they aren’t being used to store poisons. And the results of his investigations, at times, are more sulfurous than the evil yellow fogs that lurk outside our windows each winter. Cotton balls might be proof against a violin, but it isn’t as if a chap can stuff his nostrils with them the same way he can block his ears. When the atmosphere of our sitting room becomes absolutely intolerable, that is my cue to go for my coat and hat and depart for my club, where the atmosphere might be just as thick with tobacco smoke, but the company is likely to acknowledge my existence as more than a handy rack for test tubes._

_I have been known to lose my temper and declare my intention to seek out new lodgings as I depart. In fact, I generally do, having once got a dinner at Marcini’s out of Holmes when he had failed to clear the air before my return. And I did so on the day which began an adventure Holmes likes to call the Case of the Shanghaied Surgeon._

It was on a foggy Tuesday in late March, and the city of London had not seen the sun for a week. The newspapers were utterly unrewarding; the post equally so, and as a consequence I was out of temper and my fellow lodger was bereft of innocuous amusements. It should come as no surprise that by luncheon we had disagreed twice and positively squabbled once. By three in the afternoon I had stomped out of our flat with my hat jammed on my head and was stalking through the yellow fog, still too angry to be amused that the London Particular which engulfed me was markedly less malodorous than the results of Holmes’s experiments concerning the properties of hydrogen sulfate. 

Fragrant or not, the fog was still harsh on throat and lungs, and I paused at the third corner I came to, debating whether to continue towards my club or seek out the nearest pub for a little something to wet my whistle. As I did so, I heard a vigorous knocking a few doors down the side road. 

“It’s no good you pounding the door,” came a shout from some upstairs window. “The doctor’s gone to Camden, and he won’t be back for hours yet.”

I strode towards the racket, glad of a distraction. “Do you need a doctor?” I called. A few more steps brought me into view of a lanky young man wearing the wide bottomed trousers and pea coat of a sailor, who was just coming down the steps of a small portico to meet me. The red surgery lamp behind him combined with the fog to give him a devilish halo, I noted in passing, but he was already reaching out to take my hand.

“You’re a doctor?”

“I am. John Watson at your service.” I accepted his handshake and he began to lead me toward a waiting carriage.

“Jack Smith. You haven’t got your bag with you,” he noticed, looking concerned.

“It’s back at my lodgings,” I said. “Just a short walk to Baker Street.”

“Best ride there anyway, or I’ll never find you again in the fog. Oy, Bill, I’ve got us a doctor!”

Bill was a burly older man with a black beard, dressed like a tradesman with a canvas coat and a plaid cap. He appeared from the far side of the carriage as we approached, his hands jammed into his pockets as if he were cold. “Don’t look much like a doctor to me,” he grumbled, eyeing me with suspicion.

“I was a surgeon with the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers until recently,” I said, finding one of my cards to reassure him.

He brightened at my words and took the card. “Army doc, eh? That’d be useful. All right, Jack, you take the top and I’ll ride inside with the doc. And don’t waste time getting us back, you hear me?”

“Right-o!” Jack leapt up to the driver’s seat, whilst Bill and I clambered inside the carriage. It was a very nice carriage, I noticed. Not the sort of thing you’d expect a pair of Cockney’s dressed like my companions to be driving. I studied the accoutrements as we started off. Velvet curtains drawn against the fog, an isinglass window at the back, and brightly polished brass fittings. 

“You work for a rich man,” I deduced, pleased with myself for applying Holmes’s precepts.

“Something like that,” Bill said, and drew a revolver out of his pocket. He tossed a sack at me. “Now, put that over your head and sit quiet and you just might make it home alive.”

I was far too flabbergasted to protest, and Bill was handling his gun with far too much familiarity for me to think he was neither unwilling nor incapable of using it. I swallowed my annoyance and put the bag over my head. They’d kidnapped the wrong man, I consoled myself. Sherlock Holmes would notice I was missing and come find me. All I had to do was wait.

 

Three days later, I was still waiting.

It did occur to me that Holmes would have precious little to go on. I wracked my brain, trying to think whether or not I had heard the window close above our heads whilst I was meeting Jack and Bill. I tried to remember whom I had spoken to as I walked, and could only summon up a nod to the newspaper vendor a few feet from our front door. I had passed one or two other pedestrians in the fog, exchanging nods in the way of strangers caught by the same unpleasant circumstance, but I had not looked at their faces and I very much doubted they had looked at mine. And even if Holmes did find that I had been taken away by carriage, how on earth was he to trace that carriage to the docks, or me across the water to the battered steam freighter where my patients were waiting?

Jack and Bill, it turned out, were working for a mysterious figure they called only “the Professor,” whom they feared as much as trusted by the way they spoke of him. I didn’t meet the man; my services had been required to repair the damage from an altercation between two rival dockyard gangs. That five of my patients were rivals to the rest complicated matters, despite Bill’s insistence that the fight had ended in a temporary truce. I quite had to engage in a demonstration of my own skill at fisticuffs to ensure that the ship’s hold which served as a makeshift hospital didn’t become the scene of a new battle.

My authority established, I proceeded to work myself into a state of exhaustion, chipping away at the difficulties: stitching wounds here, binding broken limbs there, and attempting to convince eighteen filthy ruffians that their health would be better served by soap and water than the gin they guzzled endlessly. The honest citizens of London might have preferred me to do less than my best, but my medical instincts had come to the fore. I contented myself with memorizing names and descriptions, and the hope that the men whose injuries were mending would mention my name somewhere Holmes might hear it as I released them from my care.

I was down to nine patients when it became clear that in at least one instance, my attempt at antisepsis despite my situation had failed to prevent the worst. I placed new bandages over the gangrenous wound, patted the patient -- an older man named Willis with a singular collection of rude verses to popular songs -- on the shoulder, and went to find Bill in his cubby at the end of the hold. 

“I’m going to need my surgical instruments,” I told him. They had been fairly good about providing me with the basic necessities, but Willis had gone beyond the point where needle and thread, bandages and hope would be enough. “My _personal_ instruments.” I rubbed at the shoulder wound which had cost me my army career. “I’ve got to take that leg off, and my own instruments have been made to compensate for the damage which was done to my arm at Maiwand.”

“What damage?” he scoffed, looking me up and down. “You seem healthy enough to me.”

I bristled, not being accustomed to having my word disregarded. It seemed as if the only way to convince him would be to show him the scar, and I had no intention of parading it around. I was about to say so, when a small voice in the back of my head observed that whether or not Sherlock Holmes could trace a man who had disappeared from a foggy street, he was most certainly capable of tracing a medical kit which had disappeared from his rooms. The burglars would leave clues behind, and I’d be rescued.

“This damage,” I said, trying to keep the triumph from my voice, and began to unbutton my collar.

 

It was the next morning -- at least, I assume it was morning -- and I was attempting to drain the pus from my patient’s wound for the fifth time since supper, when the hatch at the far end of the hold opened and Sherlock Holmes dropped through, clutching my surgical kit. He was a mess. His hair was standing on end, his face was white with cold, where it wasn’t dark with bruises, and his suit had a pocket torn loose. He pulled himself upright awkwardly and looked around with the same friendly curiosity which he might display whilst visiting a shop until his eyes lighted upon me. His smile bloomed. “Watson!” he cried, coming hurriedly to my side. “There you are, old fellow. Did you know I was starting to think that you’d really taken up new quarters?”

“As if I would,” I said, standing so I could put him into my chair. I tipped up his chin so I could get a better look at his face. His left eye was swollen half-shut, and he had a bruise on his chin, but his teeth all seemed to be in place, and there was no damage to his ears. He hadn’t shaved, I realized -- not for at least two days. And his pallor was not only from the cold. “Have you been eating or sleeping?” I asked, although I knew the answer. I had seen Holmes drive himself into this state before, far too often. “Did Lestrade bring you a case after all?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” Holmes said indignantly. “Everywhere.” And in that moment I could see how much my disappearance had disturbed him. He is not a sentimental sort of fellow, not in the usual way of things. His mind spends so much time among the clouds that I believe people are often quite unreal to him. Death and murder are often only the source of grist for the extraordinary mills of his mind. But I am a doctor, and have witnessed too many times the fear of loss as war or disease seek to rob a man of the ones he loves. I knew the look in the grey eyes which were searching my countenance for signs of damage as avidly as mine had done his.

“And now you’ve found me,” I said gently, dropping a hand to his shoulder for a moment to convey my gratitude. I smiled and reached for the kit. “And you can make yourself useful, as my assistant. We’ve got an amputation to be done.”

 

It was, so far as I ever knew, a successful operation. Holmes hadn’t eaten enough to be sick, and Willis was too weak and too drunk to stay conscious once the scalpel bit into his flesh. We got the leg off in good time, and I made a decent job of the stump, pouring antiseptic everywhere I could, and injecting morphine now that I had access to a trustworthy supply. Within the hour my patient’s fever was coming down, and I felt able to relax my vigilance.

I tasked Holmes with sterilising the surgical instruments to the best of his ability in case they might be needed once more. He somehow persuaded Jack to escort him to the boiler room of the ship, where he could blast them with steam from a valve. He brought back a bucket of clean, hot, water for our own use, as well, and the news that the ship’s crew appeared to be preparing for a long sea voyage. 

“That’s torn it, then,” I told Holmes, as we retreated to sit on the cot which I had claimed. “Lestrade hasn’t a hope of finding us in time.”

Holmes wrinkled his nose at my mention of the Scotland Yard detective. “Lestrade hadn’t much hope of finding us in the first place,” he whispered back. “But don’t worry. I have a plan.”

“A plan?” I repeated, feeling my eyebrows rising. “And did your plan, by any chance, begin with letting yourself get kidnapped instead of calling in help from the Yard?”

“Well, it was the fastest way to find you,” Holmes admitted. “We just have to wait for our captors to lock us away somewhere they can’t observe us.”

“Holmes,” I said with weary dismay. “I have spent the last several days here, in this hold, under constant observation.”

“Yes, well.” Holmes shrugged, undaunted. “Any plan is subject to change, isn’t it?”

I closed my eyes, suddenly overcome with exhaustion, and rubbed my face in my hands. We were about to vanish from the face of England, and quite possibly the face of the earth entirely, and I didn’t have optimism enough to sustain myself without some sleep. “You think about it, Holmes,” I told him. “And let me know when you’ve thought of something clever.”

He patted me on the shoulder before pulling his pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket. “I will, old chap,” he said. “I will.”

 

It was the most restful sleep I’d had since I was kidnapped, but I woke when the ship shuddered and the ominous rattle of gigantic chains announced the raising of the anchor. I had been covered with a blanket as I slept, by Holmes no doubt, who was stretched out belly down on another blanket on the floor beside me, his head pillowed on his jacket. He lifted it, at the clang of a hatch somewhere out of view, for all the world like some wild creature scenting danger on the wind. I looked to see how my patients were reacting to the deepening beat of the engines and realized that four of them had gone while I dozed. I was down to just Willis and the men from the smaller gang.

“Where do you suppose we’re going?” I asked Holmes.

“The dock, first, to take on a load of freight,” Holmes said. “And from there, who knows?”

Jack, who was just coming up with the bread and beans that would constitute our luncheon, laughed. “You’re right clever,” he told my friend. “Clever enough to make yourself useful as the doc, do you think?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can manage,” Holmes said, sitting up and leaning his back against the cot before accepting the tin plate Jack offered. “Thank you. Will we be going as far as India, do you know? Watson’s been there, but I never have, and I’m quite looking forward to the chance to...”

“Holmes!” I exclaimed, sitting up to take my own plate. “Don’t tell me you’re looking forward to being dragged halfway round the world!”

“Well, it will be an adventure, won’t it?” Holmes appeared perfectly happy at the prospect. “Come now, Watson, just imagine the possibilities.”

“I have been,” I said drily. “And I can’t say I’m pleased.” I turned to Jack. “Come now, you said that once I’d taken care of medical matters you’d let me go home.”

“Well, that was before,” Jack said, blithely.

“Before? Before what?” I blustered, waving a hand at my other patients. “I’ve done my best, and they’ll all be on their feet in a few days, barring Willis, who’d be better off in a proper hospital.”

“And so he will be,” Jack said. “Once you get him ready to be moved. The Professor can still use his hands, and the Captain ain’t got no need of a one-legged sailor. But the Captain’s been trying to get a decent doc aboard for years, and now he’s paid the Professor two hundred pounds for a finder’s fee, he’s bound and determined to get his money’s worth.”

“Two hundred pounds?” Holmes whistled. “Hoist by your own petard, there, Watson.”

“How do you mean?” I said, growing quite angry. “I’m not a prize to be bought and sold!” I shared my glare between Jack and Holmes. “This is intolerable!”

“If you’d been incompetent,” he pointed out in an infuriatingly familiar manner. “They’d have let you go.”

“If he’d been incompetent,” said a new voice with a thick Dutch accent. “We’d have dropped him over the side.” A tall, heavyset blond man wearing the uniform of a ship’s officer had come up behind me, and now he put a heavy, possessive hand on my shoulder. “You should be grateful,” he told Holmes. “The doctor’s competence will keep you alive too.”

First Mate Duykens made it clear that Captain Clavart had little patience with complaints -- mine, or my patients, who were not happy to discover that they too (with the exception of Willis) were about to become seafarers. In fact, Duykens wanted them to begin work straight away, and had come down to the hold with the ship’s book, where we were expected to sign on as members of the crew. Holmes was the only one who did so with aplomb, although I observed that the scrawl he put on the page was nothing like his usual signature. I signed with a gun literally at my friend’s head, and similar incentive was used on my patients. 

I did have to insist that Duykens leave all but the two who had recovered the most to continue to rest in my care. “Either I am competent, and I know that these men cannot be set to lifting heavy objects without setting back their recovery by weeks, or I am incompetent and your captain has made a bad bargain,” I expounded. “Which would you rather tell him?”

“How long until they _can_ work?” Duykens asked, looking at the other men as if he were calculating whether or not it would be simpler to just dispose of them.

“A week, two at the most. And they’d recover faster with foods that would build up their blood.” I’d asked for that already, but iron wine and beefsteak are expensive and I did not expect a concession now.

“I can work,” Holmes piped up. “I’m much stronger than I look.”

Duykens studied him suspiciously. “Very well,” he said at last. “But if you try to escape, the doctor will pay for it. He does not have to die to suffer the consequences.”

“I wouldn’t dream of endangering Watson that way,” Holmes said, very much on his dignity.

I snorted, remembering all the other ways in which Holmes had endangered me. Although to be fair he generally endangered the both of us. “You think this is all some grand adventure, don’t you, Holmes?” I said.

“Of course,” he replied easily. “It will be something to write George about.”

“George?” I echoed, confused.

“You know. _George_ ,” Holmes said, running a hand over the top of his head and giving me a look that was clearly meant to convey more meaning than his words. “From Edinburgh.” He turned to Duykens. “If you’d be so kind as to provide an envelope, we can write our friend and ask him to place our belongings into storage at his yard until we return.”

Duykens frowned at Holmes, and then at the ship’s book with our names in it. “I will ask the Captain,” he said at last. “Perhaps he will let you post your message when we reach Leyden. Now come,” he motioned to the newest members of his crew. “We have much to do.

 

It wasn’t until Bill and Jack and I had succeeded in removing my remaining patients to a small inner compartment on one of the lower decks that I untangled Holmes’s message. Edinburgh was in Scotland, and George with a handy yard had to be our old friend and nemesis Lestrade, who had a discreet “G” painted in front of his last name on the panel outside his door. I fetched out my notebook and wrote two messages, one for the doctor who would take on Willis, recommending that he replace the bandaging as soon as possible, and another to the Inspector, which I managed to tuck inside the top layer of the bandage on Willis’s leg while Jack was checking through my surgical kit for the supply of _ferrum tartaratum_ I kept there. Willis complained about the taste when I mixed a bit of the stuff into his gin, but I made no never mind, as I felt quite pleased with myself for having managed the business with the note under the bandage.

It was just in the nick of time, too, as Willis had a visitor. I only caught a glimpse of the man; tall, thin, and pale, like Holmes, but older, and stooped, as if he spent all his time bent over his work. There was something reptilian about him that made me glad when Jack hustled me away into the compartment at the furthest end of the passage. 

The room was the size of an ambitious broom cupboard, and was already half-filled with gear, but the door had a small round window set into the middle. Frustratingly, it was set too high to be of use. Even if I had been able to break the glass, my arm would never have stretched far enough to release the lock. I tried peering along the passage for a while, but there was precious little to see. Apparently this was the first area where supplies had been stowed away for our journey, and other than Jack and Bill, no one needed to come this way. The shouts and thumps from above decks as a new cargo was loaded were muffled and the beat of the engines so rhythmic that I was hard pressed to stay awake. I soon found it necessary to abandon my vigil and curl up on a pile of duffle bags in lieu of being able to lie down properly. I may have daydreamed a bit. I certainly found myself wishing that I’d insisted that Jack hand over my surgical kit before I was confined. Imagining what I might do with a morphine-loaded syringe in my hand was a far pleasanter occupation than wondering when and where I might be allowed to go ashore once the ship had sailed.

A tapping at the door brought me back to myself. With a start, I realized that by the motion beneath me the ship _had_ sailed. The tapping came again and I disentangled myself to go see who it was.

It was Holmes. He grinned at me from a face that would have done a chimney sweep discredit and held up a hand with a filthy rag tied round it. “I have need of your medical skills, Watson,” he shouted through the glass.

I sighed. “Naturally,” I said, and then shouted back. “You’ll have to get someone to let me out!”

“Oh!” Holmes said as if the thought had just occurred to him. “Right!” His face ceased to block my view, and I watched as he trotted up the passage. He was nursing the bandaged hand a bit, but he didn’t seem badly hurt. And he had clearly already ingratiated himself with the crew. Jack, coming back with Holmes chattering after him, didn’t even bother to adjust the pistol in his belt as a threat. 

There was no sign of Bill, or any other guard. Perhaps now that we were on our way our captors felt safe in lowering their vigilance. I bit down a smile. They’d soon learn otherwise.

Jack unlocked the door and swung it open. “Come along, Doc,” he said. “It’s time you checked on your charges.”

“More than time,” I growled. “Why we must be halfway to France by now.”

“Not quite,’ Holmes said. “I believe we are just passing Tilbury Fort.”

Now that was news I could use! There was little point in obtaining control of the gun if we were too far to swim for land, but with the shore of the river so close, we had a chance of escape. Besides, I owed Jack a few bruises from my kidnapping. I waited until he had turned his head to answer one of Holmes’s questions about the port of Calcutta, and then spun on my heel and delivered an uppercut that felled him like a rotted tree.

Holmes looked down at me as I bent to fetch the revolver, his eyebrows high. “That wasn’t necessary, Watson,” he said, as if he resented having the answer to his question go unfinished.

“It most certainly was,” I replied, checking to see how many bullets I had now at my command. (Only three, drat it.) “We’re getting off this ship while it’s still in England.”

“Of course we are,” Holmes said, lending me a hand as I hauled Jack back into the compartment where I had been stranded. “I’m just saying that you didn’t need to hit him. I’ve already arranged for us to go.”

For a man whose bruises were only obscured by the filthy condition of his person, Holmes seemed unreasonably certain of himself. “Don’t tell me you’ve bargained with this scoundrel,” I protested, indicating Jack. “He’s not to be trusted, Holmes.”

“Oh, nothing like that,” said Holmes. “I’ve sabotaged the coal store. It should catch fire any minute now.”

“You _what_?”

 

Well, obviously, we couldn’t lock Jack into a compartment if it meant he might go down with a sinking ship. Nor could I in good conscience leave my patients to flounder when they were in no condition to go for a swim. A single pistol was no good against an entire crew of men, either. We debated the difficulties whilst finding rope to tie Jack (a much more difficult proposition aboard a steamship than it would have been on the sailing ships of my youth.) Holmes was uncertain of his timing. The glass flask of sulfuric acid which was the core of the exothermic reaction he had rigged need only tip, rather than break, but in either case the process needed to be triggered by the settling of the coal in the bin as the stokers did their work. Then there was the need to find my surgical kit, and to clean out the gash Holmes had deliberately given himself so as to be allowed to find me. And all the while, the ship continued to make its steady way farther and farther away from London.

Fortunately, my patients were willing to cooperate with us. Unfortunately, my kit wasn’t with them – Duykens had taken it away, along with the gin – and the poor fellows were in a good bit of pain. That, and the necessity of hauling a gagged Jack along with us, impeded our decision to acquire one of the ship’s boats by stealth. Nevertheless, we crept our way through passageways and up gangways until we reached the upper deck, and only had to take one additional hostage on our way. I’ve never been so glad to see Southend in my life. We were close enough to make out the workmen, just finishing construction on the great pier, and I wondered whether they could have heard a shout for help, or paid attention to it if they did. 

Holmes waved me back into the shelter of the passageway. “You keep an eye on things, Watson,” he said. “I’ll scout ahead.”

“Good plan,” I said. And it might have been, if at that moment Duykens and two of the crew hadn’t come around the corner and seen us. Duykens immediately drew a gun from his pocket, so I potted him one in the arm to keep him from using it. The gunshot _did_ attract attention from shore, so I can’t say that it was any great surprise that the battle which followed was interrupted. Eventually.

By that time, of course, Holmes and I were losing. We’d done our best to defend our position, but we were badly outnumbered. Duykens cared little about Jack or the other sailor we’d taken hostage, and he knew exactly how many bullets I had left. He threatened us with charges of mutiny, pointing out that we’d signed the ship’s papers, and we countered with charges of kidnapping. And then he sent men around to attack us from the rear and the fistfight began. 

All of which led to a grand brouhaha spilling out onto the main deck. I rather enjoyed that part, having wanted to hit someone for days. But it couldn’t last, and first Holmes, and then I went down under a pile of sailors. Duykens was hauling me to my feet by my collar when the thump of a shot from a boatgun and the sight of a small cannonball striking the quarterdeck startled us all into silence. 

“Steamship FRIESLAND!” came a shout through a bullhorn off to our side. “This is the police! Return to port, or face the consequences!” Duykens didn’t let go of me as he went to the side to see who had shouted. I looked over the side and saw an armed police launch, with Lestrade standing midships whilst two constables reloaded the gun. “The navy has been alerted!” the good inspector continued. “Give it up! You won’t get five miles from shore!”

“Excellent!” Holmes said, a few sailors down the rail from me. “Look, Watson, we’ve been rescued!”

Which was when the ship blew up.

 

Holmes admitted later that he had miscalculated. He meant the fire in the coal store to distract the crew, not sink the ship. Which it did. In a major shipping lane. But as it turned out that Captain Clavart was smuggling counterfeit British pounds (amongst other things) my friend got off with a mild scolding once he recovered from nearly drowning, since luckily the entire ship’s crew had come above decks in the fight and no one was below to be killed. There were a good many injuries, naturally, including the broken collarbone and ribs which had rendered my own attempt to swim for shore so difficult. But three weeks later I was able to return to Baker Street at last, and had just taken my proper place in my chair by the fire when Lestrade came to call.

“It’s good to see you home, doctor,” the Inspector said, nodding to me once he’d doffed his hat. “And none the worse for wear, I hope?”

“I’ll do,” I said, getting up carefully and offering him the hand on the side where things weren’t broken. “And I’m very glad to see you. I have had the chance to say thank you properly. I did send a letter to the Chief Inspector, though.”

“So you did,” he said, waving away the cup of tea which Holmes offered him. “No thank you, I have to head back in a moment.” Holmes shrugged and drank the tea himself. “In fact,” Lestrade went on. “It’s about that letter I came.”

“It is?” I said. 

“Yes. It’s a very nice letter, but there’s one problem. Who on earth told you my name is George?”

I looked at Holmes, who smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “I give you one guess,” I said.

“It’s the most common name beginning with G,” Holmes croaked. He had dodged pneumonia, but not a dreadful cold. “It seemed a reasonable deduction.”

“Well it wasn’t,” Lestrade said, with the satisfied air of a man who finally had one up on Sherlock Holmes.”

“Then what is it?” Holmes asked.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Lestrade pointed his hat at Holmes cheerfully, and then put it back on his head. “Stay out of trouble you two. If you can!” He went out the door, laughing at his own cleverness.

I laughed too, although it made my ribs ache. As if we ever could!


End file.
